Wes Anderson Heads Back to ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ Territory with a Stop-Motion Movie About Dogs

While the majority of the entertainment world obsesses over who will direct the next Star Wars movie or what is going to be Christopher Nolan’s next project, there are still people who obsess over the increasingly marginalized world of American art house cinema*. For them, the films of people like the Coen Bros. and Wes Anderson are their Star Wars.

As of right now we don’t know a ton of details about it, only that it’s likely to be different from some other recent projects the director has hypothesized about (including an anthology film) and unlikely to be a sequel to Fantastic Mr. Fox, because, well, Wes Anderson has yet to make a sequel to anything.

There is one other important part of the news, though. This untitled stop-motion movie about dogs is already in production. This isn’t just something he’s considering doing, it’s happening. However, that doesn’t mean we can expect the movie with any kind of a quickness for the very simple reason that stop-motion, by design, takes an exceptionally long time to animate.

Anomalisa, another recent stop-motion feature film from arthouse icon Charlie Kaufman, took three years to animate from beginning to end. So, it may be a while before we see, hear, or even really know anything about Anderson’s movie, but it’s at least nice to know that it’s in the works.

*We’re not saying you can’t be a fan of blockbusters and art house cinema – the two certainly aren’t mutually exclusive – but you just don’t see quite the level of speculation about pre-production art house movies the way you do for mainstream Hollywood.